The Lavin Agency and The New School are pleased to welcome Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jared Diamond, who discusses his latest book, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (to be released December 31, 2012). In the book, his first in more than five years, Diamond compares life in modern, industrialized societies with traditional ways of life and argues that traditional societies have much to teach us about conflict resolution, care of elders and children, risk management, multilingualism, and nutrition.

With a unique blend of anthropology, sociology, and evolutionary biology, Diamond depicts a way of life that is startlingly different from the way we live today. Focusing on how we can improve contemporary society by learning lessons from the past, Diamond’s message is both urgent and persuasive: With some thought and effort, we can have the best of both worlds.

Jared Diamond is a professor of geography at UCLA. He has won a number of awards, including the National Medal of Science, the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, Japan’s Cosmos Prize, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and the Lewis Thomas Prize: Honoring the Scientist as Poet, presented by the Rockefeller University. His books include the Pulitzer Prize–winning Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. These two books were praised by The New York Times as “one of the most significant projects embarked upon by any intellectual in our generation.”